Page 9 - UKRRptAug19

2.1 Rada Elections final results
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has once again triumphed over the country’s old elites in the parliamentary elections held on July 21: the newly formed parties of the last five years ran into yet another electoral revolution. Zelenskiy’s Servant of the People party turned out to be the unrivaled favorite in the campaign, and its candidates resolutely defeated representatives of local elites in the single-member districts.
As a result, Zelenskiy won’t just have a parliament that is under his control; he’ll also have a weak opposition in the form of the parties of Kremlin associate Viktor Medvedchuk’s Opposition Platform and militantly anti-Russia former president Petro Poroshenko’s European Solidarity party, which are highly unlikely to be able to come to any agreement between themselves, thereby giving the president free rein.
By calling snap parliamentary elections at the height of the summer, Zelenskiy —a former comic actor—took a gamble: his voters could quite simply have gone away on vacation (and indeed turnout was at a record low of just under 50%). Yet positive inertia from the presidential election back in spring played its role, and Zelenskiy’s party, Servant of the People, had a sweeping victory, receiving 122 seats under the party list system, and 125 in the single-member districts, giving it a majority in the Verkhovna Rada, which has a total of 450 seats.
Zelenskiy’s team has managed to repeat its success in the presidential elections, winning on party lists in virtually all regions of the country except the Donbas, where Medvedchuk’s Opposition Platform—For Life led (its candidate Yuriy Boyko also won the first round of the presidential election there), and in the Lviv region, where rock star Svyatoslav Vakarchuk’s Holos (Voice) party won (Poroshenko won the first round of the presidential election there).
These results enable Servant of the People to form a single-party majority in the Rada, without the need for coalition partners, though given his declared wish to unite the country and inject fresh blood into its elites, it would be useful for Zelenskiy to try to bring Holos into some sort of coalition focused on renewal. This would enable the new president to extend a hand to western Ukraine, where his position is not so strong, and to realize the long-held Ukrainian dream of “east and west together.” On the other hand, Vakarchuk has close ties to the national-democratic camp whose leader is now Poroshenko, so the musician may refuse to join forces with Zelenskiy.
Composition of Ukraine's parliament
Party
seats
share
Servant of the People (Zelenskiy)
254
43.16%
Opposition Platform (Medvedchuk)
43
13.05%
Fatherland (Tymoshenko)
26
8.18%
9 UKRAINE Country Report August 2019 www.intellinews.com